Expert? Me? Oh no.

Thanks to the brilliant Lucy Werner’s Hype Yourself newsletter and the Substack algorithm (thank you likers and commenters), I’ve had a flurry of new subscribers this week – thanks so much for being here.

I want you to see how the skills, experience and know-how developed during your corporate life can help you build a better one post-corporate.  I believe there’s a much richer tapestry of opportunities on offer after you leave; one that’s frankly impossible to find in a single job.

Added to which, for most of us the tapestry starts to fade over time as we specialise and focus and the opportunities around us decrease.

I began to plateau in my career five years before I left.  I had settled, able to do my job blind-folded with both hands tied behind my back.

I volunteered some extra hours to work with BP’s venture capital arm.  I was farmed out to offer my marketing skills to some of its startup investment companies.  Then I was asked to help set up BP’s venture builder, where I was de facto Marketing Director of all the companies we built because they didn’t have one.

I loved working with startups.  So much so that I decided to leave BP when the next restructure came around and build my own.  It was called Familiarize, a customer discovery tech startup.  It wasn’t a giant success. Partly because I got the customer wrong (ironically), partly because I don’t think I was that kind of entrepreneur.

But by then I had spoken to several hundred startups and had become good at helping them better understand their customer.

This week I met with 30+ startups.  A marathon, beginning with a workshop for 50 odd founders and co-founders, followed by 33 one to ones with founders working in Decentralised Finance, Inclusive Finance, Sustainability, Energy and Mobility.  I know.

Startups from Chile, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Netherlands, India, UK & Ireland.

Founders are a tough crowd.  They’re impatient, strong-willed, often over-confident and easily distracted.

So to hold their attention you need to add value fast and make it worth their while.  Plus they’ve paid a lot in equity to join this programme so they expect a lot.

I’m pretty sure I’ve delivered.

But the idea of this four or five years ago would have been unthinkable.

Although my confidence then was high in my narrow field of influence, outside of this narrow domain and definitely outside of my company, my confidence in my value and offer was much lower.

It’s a common theme in most of my interactions with corporate people: confident in-house, much less confident about the real world outside.

And it’s what keeps many people – including me – staying put longer than is really good for them.

I remember my first few meetings with founders from BP’s startups and the surging imposter syndrome “How can I possibly help them?”.  I remember relying on my BP badge to give me credibility, rather than what I knew.

Fast forward six years I see the same self-doubt in some of the mentors I connect to startup founders.  I try to reassure them how grateful those founders are and how much value they gain from the skills, experience and knowledge of those corporate mentors.

But they won’t believe me.  Until they see it and test it for themselves.

We all know intuitively that pushing outside our comfort zone is how we grow, how we learn, but it’s also how we see a bigger version of ourselves, how we test ourselves and (mostly) exceed our own expectations.

It makes us vulnerable, it takes courage and it involves risk, but it’s also who we really are - underneath all that corporate comfort.

Is it time to be who you really are? To do what lights you up? To be where you can truly excel?

If I can help you or someone you know struggling with a career that’s plateauing, redundancy or just wanting something more from life beyond work, please share this blog or take a look at my Instagram, podcast (here or here) and my Escape Method course.

I had so many lovely messages last week wishing Bertie well and hoping he made the right choice for himself.  He did I think.  At 11, he’s not yet been conditioned by some of the pressures imposed by education and work life.  I’m proud of him, like I am of everyone who backs themselves.